A blog about politics, education, Ireland, culture and travel. I am Conor Ryan, Dublin-born former adviser to Tony Blair and David Blunkett on education. Views expressed on this blog are written in a personal capacity.

Friday, 16 November 2012

I've written this piece in my capacity as Director of Research and Communications for the Sutton Trust for the first edition of Teaching Leaders Quarterly:

Times are tough in schools, as across the public sector. But
there is one element of the school budget that is growing, and is set to grow
further. The pupil premium, worth £600 this year, is set to rise to £900 next
year and could reach £1200 per pupil by 2015, the year of the next election. The
average school receives £53,000 this year, and more than 2800 receive more than
£100,000. The challenge for school leaders is in how to use that money where it
will have most impact.

The premium was created by the Government to narrow the
attainment gap between pupils in receipt of free school meals and their
schoolmates, and to encourage successful schools to take more disadvantaged
pupils. Although previous governments have provided extra resources for such
pupils through extra funding to local authorities with high levels of poverty,
this is the first grant that is paid to schools for each disadvantaged pupil,
regardless of where the school is located.

There is certainly a real issue. England has one of the most
divided education systems in the developed world. Recent research has shown that our schools are
among the most segregated in the OECD. According to Department for Education statistics, only 35
per cent of pupils eligible for free school meals achieved five good GCSEs,
including English and Maths, in 2011 compared to 62 per cent of all other
pupils. At the end of primary school, 58 per cent of pupils eligible for free school
meals achieved the expected level in both English and mathematics in 2011, compared
with 78 per cent of all other pupils.
The premium is intended to narrow those gaps, which despite some small
improvements, have remained stubbornly large over recent years.

Moreover,
England is relatively unusual in having a gap that widens after the start of
secondary school. The Government has not ring-fenced the pupil premium money,
although schools are now expected to publish details of their pupil premium
spending on their websites. The attainment of pupils in receipt of the premium
will also be included in the league tables.

Nevertheless, with many budgets frozen, it can be tempting
for school leaders to try to focus spending on simply maintaining or expanding
staff numbers. And it is here that school leaders, including middle leaders
heading teaching departments, have a particularly important role.

The National Foundation for Education Research, in a survey of 1700 teachers in 1200 English schools for the Sutton Trust earlier this
year, showed that little of the pupil premium allocation for 2012-13 – a sum
worth £1.25 billion in total – was likely to be spent on activities proven to
be the best bets for boosting attainment.

Eight per cent of teachers said the money would offset other
budget cuts. 28 per cent said it would either be used to employ new staff or
cut class sizes. A further 28 per cent didn’t know how the money would be used.

A more recent survey of 260 school leaders for Ofsted found that only one in ten school leaders said that the pupil premium
had significantly changed the way that they supported pupils from disadvantaged
backgrounds. School leaders commonly told inspectors that they were using the
funding to maintain or enhance existing provision rather than to put in place
new initiatives. The most common use was to
pay for teaching assistants.

Yet the evidence shows that simply employing more teachers
or assistants, and deploying them as they have been deployed in the past, is a
costly but relatively ineffective way of boosting attainment. Researchers at
Durham University assessed 21 different interventions for both impact on
attainment and relative cost and helped the Sutton Trust to create a toolkit
which a growing number of schools are using to set priorities for the premium.
The toolkit will be updated and expanded by our sister organisation, the
Education Endowment Foundation, in 2013.

The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows
that there are three strategies that schools can undertake with a high impact
at relatively low cost. Using evidence from here and abroad, they calculate
that each of these strategies can provide the equivalent of between six and
nine months extra learning, at a cost of around £170 per pupil.

The single most cost-effective strategy identified is
improving feedback from teachers to pupils. Providing effective feedback is
challenging, but it is important that it is provided well. Research suggests
that it should be specific, accurate and clear – in other words, provide an
explanation as well as a judgement. It should compare what the student is doing
now with what they were previously doing. It should encourage and support
further effort, but it should also be given sparingly so that it is meaningful
as too much feedback can stop learners working out what they need to do for
themselves. Importantly, It should provide specific guidance on how pupils can
improve.

Ensuring that feedback is consistently and effectively
provided is not a cost-free exercise, but with regular professional development,
it is estimated that it would cost £2000-£5000 a year per teacher, or as little
as £170 per pupil.

The second most effective approach is what the academics
call ‘meta-cognition’, or programmes that teach pupils strategies to plan,
monitor and evaluate their own learning. This is often referred to in schools
as ‘learning to learn’. These strategies involve students being aware of their
strengths and weaknesses as a learner, being able to set and monitor goals and
having strategies to choose from or switch to during learning activities.

The Toolkit recognises that this is not always easy. A
teacher can support pupils’ work too much, so that they do not learn to manage
their own learning but rely too much on their teacher’s prompts. The Toolkit suggests
that a useful metaphor is scaffolding: you remove the support and dismantle the
scaffolding to check that learners are managing their own learning well.

The third approach that is seen as having high impact at low
cost is peer tutoring in Maths and English. This can take a number of different
forms. In cross-age tutoring, an older pupil tutors a younger schoolmate. The
EEF is piloting a project based at Durham University involving ten year-olds
acting as tutors in maths for eight year-olds.

Peer-Assisted Learning is a structured approach for
mathematics and reading with session of 25-35 minutes two or three times a week.
Reciprocal Peer Tutoring sees pupils tutor and be taught by their classmates.
The common characteristic is that learners take on responsibility for aspects
of teaching and for evaluating their success.

These proven approaches are worth considering by schools as
a way of making the pupil premium go far. By contrast, the evidence suggests
that, as they are currently deployed, employing extra teaching assistants
produces little impact, despite the relatively high cost, and that reducing
class sizes could produce learning gains equivalent to three months, but at a
much higher cost of £1000-£1200 per pupil on average.

Behind all these approaches is the recognition that at the
heart of school improvement lies good teaching – how teachers do their job in
the classroom, and how they enable pupils to learn effectively. Strategies
focused on improving teaching feature much more highly in the Toolkit than
structural changes like block scheduling or ability grouping. Nobody would
argue that this is a novel insight. But it now has the benefit of being backed
up by all the best international evidence.

Research for the Sutton Trust by leading UK and US academics
has shown that English schools could move into the world’s top five education
performers within a decade if the performance of the least effective tenth of
teachers were brought up just to the average.

For middle leaders that is as much an in-school challenge as
one between schools. Variations in teaching quality within schools are often greater
than those between schools. So, a strong focus across all teachers on proven
teaching and learning strategies could pay real dividends in how much pupils
learn and on their results.

Traditionally in Britain there has been too little
connection between research and the classroom. Too much research has felt
remote from classroom life, and too many teachers have been unaware of the
latest research where it could improve their teaching. The Sutton Trust/EEF Teaching
and Learning Toolkit makes research accessible as never before, and provides
leaders with the tools to make the most of limited resources.

When the NFER asked teachers how their school decided which
approaches and programmes to adopt to improve pupils’ learning, only 36 per cent of teachers
said their school looked at research evidence on the impact of different
approaches and programmes.

The Toolkit is recognised by the National Association of
Head Teachers, the Department for Education and Ofsted as a good resource for
schools in deciding how to spend the pupil premium. Employing its insights
could ensure that the premium pays real dividends in the classroom – and for
your less advantaged pupils.

Friday, 9 November 2012

This week, the Commons Business, Innovation and Skills Committee
called for apprenticeships to be seen as equal to study at university.

As the Committee noted in a hard-hitting report,
the problem under successive governments has been a focus on the
quantity of qualifications rather than their quality. Many of the old
Train to Gain qualifications were effortlessly rebranded as
apprenticeships. This has fed an attitude in England that sees the
vocational as inferior.

In their report, the MPs argue: “There
remains an underlying assumption that vocational training is only for
those unable to take an academic route. This is wrong and must be
changed.”

They make a host of practical suggestions, including
giving the academic and the vocational route equal prominence in careers
advice, as well as useful reforms to the apprenticeship system.

But
the problem is surely rather more fundamental in Britain. Vocational
education is too often seen not only as something for those with few
GCSEs, but also treated in a narrow sense that owes more to the world of
50 years ago than Britain today.

Yet a true vocational system
should be about preparing people not only for crafts and trades, but for
careers in business and the professions. Martin Doel, the chief
executive of the Association of Colleges, argued in an Institute for Public Policy Research pamphlet last year that we should create a master craftsmen role – akin to the German meister – in the UK apprenticeship programme, something that would certainly help to change perceptions.

Indeed,
in Germany, apprenticeships are not simply seen as being as good as a
university education; in many careers they are seen as superior.

There
are two important aspects to the German system that set it apart. The
first is that it has a long tradition of very high standards policed by
business and the professions in a way that the Sector Skills Councils
have never really been able to emulate here.

The second - more
troubling aspect for some - is that they depend very heavily on a system
of licensing that appears anathema in our more open economy. As Bagehot in the Economisthas put it: “The bedrock of Germany's apprenticeship system is corporatism and restricted practice.”

In his speech to the Sutton Trust social mobility summit
last May, the opposition leader Ed Miliband first introduced his ideas
of the ‘forgotten 50%’ – those young people who don’t go to university,
but for whom learning a trade or a craft used to be a strong vehicle for
social mobility. He said:

“I also want to challenge some of the
assumptions about social mobility. A few months ago I met a group of
apprentices working at Jaguar Land Rover. They told me how lucky they
felt to be working on racing car prototypes. They had found a path into a
really exciting job. One where they would be trained, stretched and
expected to make use of their talent.

“They were at the beginning
of a career. One which will lead to better wages, better prospects and a
better life than perhaps their parents had. But they told me they felt
they were the lucky few…In Germany, middle-class parents boast about
their kids doing great apprenticeships. But in Britain, too often people
think that if they don’t go to university, they are written off by
society.”

Ed Miliband was right to say that social mobility must
be about more than a good university education for those who should be
able to benefit from it. It should also be about ambitious
apprenticeships, top-class technical education and pre-eminent
professional training.

That is why the Sutton Trust will be
working with the Boston Consulting Group in the months ahead to
investigate whether there are lessons we can learn from abroad that have
an application here.

Of course, we will look at Germany. But,
while the strengths in quality of German vocational education may well
outweigh its corporatism, we accept that many aspects of a German system
with a tradition that stretches back to Bismarck may not be so easy to
import.

So we will also look at Singapore, a country with a
similar exam system to Britain that has revamped its poorly regarded
vocational system since 1992 through the creation of the Institute for
Technical Education (ITE). According to the OECD,
the ITE has transformed the content, quality and image of vocational
education. Enrolment has doubled and ITE students now constitute about
25% of the post-secondary cohort. Pay levels and job prospects for ITE
graduates are also strong.

Publications

Excellence in Education (2005)

About Me

Dublin-born in 1963, since September 2012 I have been Director of Research and Communications for the Sutton Trust. I was previously senior adviser to David Blunkett from 1993-2001 and Tony Blair's senior education adviser from 2005-7. I have also been an independent writer and consultant. I am the author (with Cyril Taylor) of Excellence in Education (David Fulton, 2004)and Freedom from Failure (CPS, 2002); and editor of Bac or Basics (SMF, 2004) and Staying the Course (SMF, 2008), co-editor with Julian Astle of a book on Academies (Centreforum, 2008) and author of Lessons for Life (HTI, 2011). I have also written many articles for the Guardian, Independent, Daily Mail, Evening Standard, Times, Sunday Times, TES, Irish Times, Public Finance, New Statesman and Tribune, among other publications, and contributed to many national and local radio and TV news programmes in the UK and Ireland. I am a director at a multi-academy trust and a trustee of the National Foundation for Educational Research.
All views expressed on this blog are my own and appear in a personal capacity.